Contrary to the belief that prisons never predated colonial rule in Africa, this article traces their emergence in the Gold Coast after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. During the era of ‘legitimate commerce’, West African merchants required liquidity to conduct long-distance trade. Rather than demand human pawns as interest on loans, merchants imprisoned debtors’ female relatives because women's sexual violation in prison incentivized kin to repay loans. When British colonists entered the Gold Coast, they discovered how important the prisons were to local credit. They thus allowed the institutions to continue, but without documentation. The so-called ‘native prisons’ did not enter indirect rule — and the colonial archive — until the 1940s. Contrary to studies of how Western states used prisons to control black labour after emancipation, this article excavates a ‘debt genealogy’ of the prison. In the Gold Coast, prisons helped manage cash flow after abolition by holding human hostages.
This essay locates the concept of Afropolitanism, introduced in the mid‐2000s by Achille Mbembe and Taiye Selasi, inside a longer historiography on cosmopolitanism in Africa. Used to describe the multifarious ways that Africa is enmeshed in the world, today ‘Afropolitanism’ connects Africa's global metropolises, transnational cultures and mobile populations under a single analytic term, signifying the radical diversity that Africa possesses now and has throughout history. This essay argues that the idea of Afropolitanism has impacted theory on Africa in two ways. First, instead of regarding pluralism as a threat to state stability, Africa's cosmopolitan cities and zones are now thought to be harbingers of a new post‐racial political future; rather than supposing that states will progressively coalesce into defined nations, as per the organic analogy, ethnically heterogeneous states are increasingly upheld as ‘modern’. Second, Afropolitanism marks a radical shift from a longer history of black emancipatory thought. Contra 20th century Pan‐African and Afrocentrist endeavours to create a civilization based on the ‘African Personality’, proponents of Afropolitanism instead propose a world in which there can be no centre for Africa, no cultural integrity, only networks and flows.
To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.
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